The present invention generally relates to healthcare workflow. More specifically, the present invention relates to systems and methods for profiling clinic workflow.
Hospitals and other medical facilities, such as, imaging centers and clinics, continually seek to improve or optimize utilization of resources and productivity in their workflows. For example, a clinic may have a workflow for admitting a patient. As another example, a workflow may correspond to a care plan for treating a patient with a particular disease.
Current systems may utilize a workflow engine as a central component of a clinical information system. The workflow engine may be implemented as a standard Business Process Management (BPM) system. Alternatively, various components maybe used in combination to serve a similar purpose.
The purpose of the workflow engine within a complex enterprise system is to manage interactions between people and system components, referred to as actors, performing different roles. In the case of healthcare workflow, the actors operate together to provide healthcare services. These interactions are often complex, and each role may be dependent upon the completion of other tasks or subtasks performed by other actors or occurrences of external events. The workflow engine may be used for both synchronous and asynchronous workflow management. Planning and programming these workflow interactions into the workflow engine is a major task, often taking many months.
In current systems, healthcare practitioner workflow is managed either manually or by static configurations of healthcare information systems. Measuring the actual efficacy of a workflow with current systems is manual, tedious, and ad hoc, and results in poor feedback of improvements into the system.
Thus, a need exists for systems and methods for profiling clinic workflow.